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It’s notable that both Kane Parsons, who directed Backrooms, and Curry Barker, of Obsession fame, started their film-making careers on YouTube making scary shorts. They’ve both come up with what are often described as the best horror movies of the year. In the case of Obsession that’s clearly true: there’s much screaming, ick and yuk. … Read more
The Lady Eve is a brilliant piece of writing by Preston Sturges, and playing by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Screwball comedy you could call it, or a comedy of remarriage, maybe, except nobody remarries. But that is the guiding idea – two people who have been together and possibly will be again, if fate … Read more
Gentle gothic. If there is such a thing then Couture might be it. A slice down through the fashion industry, it’s also, maybe, Alice Winocour’s riposte to Robert Altman’s Pret à Porter – serious, ground-level drama not airy, star-filled satire. That said, no less than Angelina Jolie is in it. She plays a commercials director … Read more
Is it Secrets of a Soul or Secrets of the Soul? Both variations of the title seem to be in play. It was Geheimnisse einer Seele in the original German, which suggests it’s the indefinite article – do with that what you will. Either way this is a strange film from the silent era. Expressly designed … Read more
Bunny-boiler females are nothing new. But if there is a pantheon, Inde Navarrette must surely be in it on the strength of her performance in Obsession, sitting alongside Glenn Close (for Fatal Attraction), Kathy Bates (Misery) and, perhaps closest of all in spirit, Isabelle Adjani, for her unhinged performance in Possession. Navarrette plays Nikki, a … Read more
Five loosely interlinked dollops of gonzo storytelling is the offer in Survive Style 5+. They are all, to an extent, stories of surviving, and there are five of them, so that more or less explains the title. The + could be a reference to the second half of the movie, when things take a turn … Read more
How angry would you be if your life partner suddenly died and your son sent an employee along to help with the funeral, rather than turning up himself? That is the opening position of Miss You, Love You, an unusual two-hander running largely on bile. One of life’s great joys is watching Allison Janney playing … Read more
A flop redeemed by time, The Lost Moment was too gothic, too excessive for 1947 but here in the 2020s it fits quite snugly in alongside the likes of The Vourdalak, Uninvited, The Girl with the Needle, The Maid or either of the recent takes on Nosferatu. An adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, … Read more
A coming-of-ager set in 2006. Which means what? iPods and computers with big chunky displays. AOL Messenger. And Zach Braff! All are here in Girls Like Girls, Hayley Kiyoko’s feature debut, which was a song, a music video and a book before it became a film. Work that IP. Though not in it much, Braff … Read more
Fans of Richard Widmark who can’t get enough of his giggling psychopath routine, Kiss of Death is for you. This is where it all started, in 1947, a crime drama notable not only for being Widmark’s screen debut but also for delivering a really good performance by Victor Mature. Having grown up in a household … Read more
Blue Heron is largely the story of its maker, Sophy Romvari, or of her young life, as seen from a couple of decades on. How much of it is true? There’s a disclaimer up front about memory and its unreliability, so possibly not all of it. And in any case Romvari takes a couple of … Read more
Screwball but not particularly comedy, in spite of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s presence, Holiday is too serious a business to be unserious about, and there aren’t really any jokes in it. But Grant bashes through it as if it were in the key of fun, and he drags everyone and everything along in his … Read more
